Beautiful Bespoke Blazers — by a Trio of Friends

Delfina Pinardi’s love affair with blazers began when, as a young horseback rider in Italy, she received her first made-to-measure equestrian jacket. “I remember my initials were carefully embroidered on the collar, and I wore a crisp white shirt and a beautiful black velvet hat to match.” For Blazé Milano — the bespoke women’s line that Pinardi started with her friends Sole Torlonia and Corrada Rodriguez D’Acri — vivid, larger-than-life childhood memories are woven into every jacket.

Torlonia, who shares Pinardi’s passion for riding (and riding habits), grew up on a stud farm outside of Rome. Rodriguez D’Acri’s affection for a beautifully cut blazer began with the perfectly pressed, gold-buttoned uniforms of her father, an officer in the Italian Navy. Her family’s 17th-century ancestral estate in Sicily, with its ornate drapery, brilliantly colored wall murals and ancient frescoes that Rodriguez D’Acri and her mother touched up by hand, inspired the fabrics for Blazé: heavy linens in misty lavender and cream, plush velvets in tangerine and lemon hues, milky quilted silks and baroque lamé bouclés.

The Milan-based trio, all former fashion editors, began selling their jackets to friends in 2014 through trunk shows, essentially providing the kind of service a traveling gentleman’s tailor would. “We knew lots of companies making blazers for women, but none that specialized in them,” Rodriguez D’Acri says. Now, Blazé (a portmanteau that evokes both the garment and nonchalant French glamour) has an international cult of gamine followers, like Tania de Rothschild, Charlotte Casiraghi and Caroline de Maigret. The jackets, which come in five streamlined styles and are hand-stitched in Milan, can be bought off-the-rack or ordered as couture.